Context: Science of science workshop: discovery & inequality The data and computational tools in use are not only transforming the field, they are recursively shaping the radiative speciation of scientific practice as their own transmission medium. We rarely notice just how profoundly trajectories in science and technology are a reflexive function of the extended phenotype […]
Context: A theory of reality that makes sense On the topic of the nominally closed systems referenced in the article above, much of the closure asserted (or interpreted) is at a cost of displacing or offsetting the external dependencies of those systems. Yes, there is a certain degree of ontological individuation without which rationality and […]
There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]
Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]
On the topic of untenable belief systems, unsubstantiated conspiracies, intransigent disinformation and ideological absurdity – I was watching a lecture from Gresham College today in which psychosis was posited as the default mental state. If the default state of human mental life is in fact some kind of dissociative discontinuity and stochastic chaos, this might […]
Context: Seeing today that Russia might next invade Lithuania, some thoughts occur… While Putin is surely not the only unrepentant misanthrope at work here, Ukraine and all possibilities beyond remain his invasion, his war(s), and his bumbling catastrophe that seek in such imperialist atavism some kind of narcissistic self-aggrandisement. The brutal psychology of tribal warlords […]
The totalitarian enigma is that of a psychotic state. The threat of nuclear war is invoked because they have no intellectual or moral substance to and justication for their ideological arguments to support either internal political oppression or external imperalistic aggression. The argument from apocalypse is an act of insanity and even if it is […]
There is no place in this world for Vladimir Putin and all tyrants like him in all nations, everywhere. He belongs to another time, an era of indiscriminate bloodshed and rapine brutality between warring tribes that is hardly even the greater part of history but returns as though a metastatic cancer and tragedy that haunts […]
The enigma of the totalitarian state is that it must constantly invoke by provocation precisely those threats and fears that its ideology is founded upon to validate the brute-forced tyrannical exploitation and mobster-kleptocratic oppression of its own people. It is a cycle and spiral of sheer absurdity that would be fascinating to observe as the […]
The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]
Context: Oceans are facing a mass extinction event comparable to the ‘Great Dying’ The oceans are dying and yes, friends, this is the kind of vast and unremitting catastrophe that, unlike global wars invoked by the pathological ideological autocratic states that are just not clever enough to understand how stupid and self-persecutory their actions are, […]
Marcus Aurelius once wrote that the very worst a person could do in life is to make themselves into a kind of blemish upon history and the world. We do not have to think very long or hard to find contemporary examples of just such an abhorrence and regrettably misanthropic wart upon all of history […]
Daedelus Kite 